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Elon Musk ‘picked a fight with America’ say critics, ‘he has no idea the DARPA rattlesnake he just stepped on’

July 3, 2023 | | Print Article

Twitter users are taking aim at Elon Musk over his move to place temporary limits on the number of posts people can read in a single day, with one Fox News contributor saying the billionaire has “picked a fight with America.”

“Forget the fight with Mark Zuckerberg,” stated Joey Jones on Sunday, “Elon Musk has just picked a fight with America.”

As BizPac Review reported, Musk stated on Saturday that he imposed the limits in order to “to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation” on the platform.

After initially stating that verified accounts — those who pay the $8 per month for Twitter Blue — could read up to 6,000 posts per day, with unverified accounts limited to just 600, and new unverified accounts restricted to 300 per day, he upped the limits to “10K, 1K & 0.5K,” respectively.


“It’s a shakedown. It’s a shakedown to get people. He thinks we’re so addicted to this. ‘Hey, you know let me shake them down real quick. They will all sign up for Twitter Blue,'” Jones stated on “The Big Weekend Show.”

(Video: YouTube)

Co-host Raymond Arroyo called the move “heartbreaking.”

“Elon Musk, when he bought Twitter, said, ‘I am going to be the protector of free speech.,'” Arroyo said. “Well, looking at this move, he’s closer to Xi Jinping than James Madison on free speech. He’s completely controlling the speech. He’s limiting not only what you can see, but who you can interact with and how much speech and conversation you can engage in.”

“This is very bad for his brand, terrible for his argument for buying Twitter, and, I think, breaks hearts of longtime Twitter users,” he stated.

Part of the outrage may stem from the fact that many average users simply don’t understand the implications of “data scraping.”

Foundation for Freedom Online Executive Director Mike Benz attempted to explain the practice, tweeting that Musk “has no idea the DARPA rattlesnake he just stepped on by this doing this…”

In a nearly nine-minute video, Benz approached the subject “from the perspective of the censorship industry.”

He said Musk’s move has “wide-ranging implications for the science of censorship.”

“AI [artificial intelligence] censorship is where all the magic happens,” Benz said.

As the “Twitter Files” showed, the FBI may have had 22 tweets censored, he continued, “but AI is how EIP [Election Integrity Partnership] and other types of third-party censorship groups were able to get 22 million tweets censored.”

“It’s a completely different animal,” Benz said, thanks to an “AI censorship Death Star that has been under construction and innovation and renovation every week, every month, every year for the past six, seven years now.”

“It all relies on massive scraping of Twitter data in order to build these [AI] models and databases to track trending narratives, to systematically surveil and build, sort of, intelligence dossiers and to track and to turn down all at once communities online,” he stated. “Political communities, social or public health communities, climate communities — you name it, whatever the sensitive policy of the day is — you can use this massive Twitter scraping capacity to ingest everyone’s tweets and then disambiguate out all the words that they are using and the hashtags, the themes, the memes, and to build this sort of code book of online communities that can then be used for mass censorship.”

“That is used for mass censorship,” he clarified.

Benz explained that MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan’s attempt to debunk “Twitter Files” reporter Matt Taibbi’s claims that EIP got 22 million tweets classified as misinformation was deceptive.

(Video: YouTube)

EIP “didn’t flag 22 million by hand,” Benz said. “This was something that Mehdi Hasan, the MSNBC host, flagrantly deceived his millions of viewers about when he said, ‘Oh, they only flagged 3,000, not 22 million… so you’re only off by 21.7 million.'”

“No, you butthead,” Benz continued. “Actually, what happened was, they used AI to designate 22 million because they scraped 859 million tweets to build their AI model, of which they said 22 million constituted misinformation.”

“The 3,000 was just the tip of the 22 million iceberg,” he said, “because back in the Twitter iteration before today, these third-party censorship consortiums could just mass-ingest hundreds of millions of tweets all at once in order to build these vast censorship models in order to control all of public conversation all at once.”

Twitter, he goes on to explain, is different from Facebook, YouTube, and other social media platforms because, unlike the others, it is not a “walled garden.”

“You can map real-time narrative emergence on Twitter in a way that you can’t do on any other social media platform,” Benz said. “And that has been used by the CIA, the State Department, the Defense Department, hundreds of censorship government-funded NGOs, centers, non-profit foundations, university quote-unquote research centers — the works.”

“In order to build their social media censorship Death Star, they need to be able to scrape hundreds of millions of tweets,” he said, and while some might argue the move to limit the number of tweets you can read is a form of censorship, “you are potentially preserving the openness of the internet by preventing the construction of this censorship Death Star that is getting more and more refined every day and is being funded by your tax dollars to the tunes of tens of millions from DARPA and the National Science Foundation, to say nothing of all the State Department and U.S. National Endowment for Democracy grants.”

Having said all of that, Benz does not dismiss the obvious potential the limits have to generate revenue for Twitter.

“You can sort of have normal Twitter if you have a verified account, because the 8,000 rate limit is pretty substantial,” Benz said. “But 800 is not a lot.”

Melissa Fine
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